Metroseksualizm. Obraz w języku i kulturze. Rekonstrukcja na podstawie źródeł internetowych oraz materiału ankietowego

Abstract

In this book, I deal with metrosexuality as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon which includes issues related to gender, corporality and identity. In this paper I propose the definition of metrosexuality as a way of being, not identical with homosexuality and characteristic of young city inhabitants. It has been formed as a result of cultural gender symmetry, in which men enter areas commonly considered as feminine. Therefore, it can be described as a variant, peripheral category of prototypically understood masculinity, i.e. one that is carried out beyond the traditional heteronormative matrix (Chapter Starting point). This book presents a social topic - a topic that can draw the attention of a Polish man interested in what is happening around him - in the broadest possible way. I have acquired the linguistic content from various online sources in which are reflected contemporary culture-forming tendencies: Americanization, globalization, aestheticisation, and consumerism. I was inspired by the post-modern humanities (chapter First Inspiration: postmodern humanities) and linguisties referring to the methodology of the linguistic image of the world, cultural studies, anthropology and culture sociology (chapter Second Inspiration: linguistic) . The background of these considerations are the classic definitions of femininity and masculinity and the way of implementing social roles throughout history (chapter Prototype model of masculinity). In the most important from the linguistic point of view, chapter (chapter Peripheral version of masculinity - metrosexualism), I look at neologisms describing the masculine style of behavior. I start with metrosexuality and I recall its definitions and connotations (consumer, visual). Moreover, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the lexeme also became the basis for creating the definitions of new ways of realizing masculinity, and secondarily non-normative sexuality. I used Polish-language (dictionaries, The Polish Language Corpus PWN, National Corpus of the Polish Language) and English-language data (columns in electronic versions of popular magazines, such as "The Guardian", "The Independent", "New Yorker", online dictionaries of official and unofficial English), I reconstruct the meaning of words such as: fauxmosexuality (1992), pomosexuality (1997), sapiosexuality (2003), retrosexuality (2005), lumbersexuality (after 2000), techosexuality (2004), ubersexuality (2005), hummersexuality, ecosexuality (2006), datasexuality (2012), spornosexuality (2014). They are characteristic for cultural changes and they constitute a fascinating issue in the context of growing interest of men's studies, inscribed in the landscape of post-modern discourses regarding gender. Currently, they form the semantic field of masculinity. In the next part (chapter Characteristics of metrosexualism in the academic environment of Bialystok), I describe the social reception of metrosexuality as: the aesthetics of the body, the style of dressing, the way of being, and its valuation. In the study I used surveys conducted among students of 19 study courses of Bialystok colleges. My reconstruction shows that metrosexuality has gained a special place among various types of "masculinity" and it is not likely to disappear in the near future. From the history of language - at this point also Polish - it will not disappear as it is impossible to erase already existing words from the dictionaries. The book is supplemented with illustrative material (chapter Visualizations).